About us

A look into the UBA Dessau-Roßlau: the atriumSource: Christian Breywisch

Since its founding in 1974, the UBA has been Germany’s main environmental protection agency. Read more about us, here.

20.05.2015

Our mission

The UBA’s motto, For our environment (“Für Mensch und Umwelt”) sums up our mission pretty well, we feel. As Germany’s main environmental protection agency , our task is to ensure that our fellow citizens have a healthy environment with clean air and water, free of pollutants to the greatest extent possible. Here at the UBA, we concern ourselves with an extremely broad spectrum of issues, including waste avoidance, climate protection, and pesticide approvals.

Our work centers around gathering data concerning the state of the environment, investigating the relevant interrelationships and making projections – and then, based on these findings, providing federal bodies such as the Ministry of the Environment with policy advice. We also provide the general public with information and answer your questions on all of the various issues that we address. Apart from these activities, we implement environmental law by making sure that it is applied in areas such as CO2 trading and approval processes for chemicals, pharmaceutical drugs and pesticides. Our activities are set down in the law that established our agency.

Our overarching mission is early detection of environmental risks and threats so that we can assess them and find viable solutions for them in a timely manner. We do this by conducting research in our own labs and by outsourcing research to scientific institutions in German and abroad. We are also the German point of contact for numerous international organizations such as WHO.

Staff and organizational structure

Here at the UBA, we employ experts such as biologists, chemists, economists, lawyers and engineers from all ecology related disciplines – the goal being to examine environmental issues from all sides and develop viable solutions.

We have around 1,500 employees spread across 13 sites, seven of which are monitoring stations in our own air quality tracking network. The UBA is composed of five specialized environmental divisions, plus our General Services Division, which performs various services via entities such as our human resource unit. For a detailed overview of and information concerning our divisions, see our organizational chart.

03.12.2015

German Environment Agency

The impact of climate change will be felt more strongly in the future – and in Germany too. This is the conclusion reached in what is called the vulnerability analysis, a comprehensive study on Germany's vulnerability to climate change.

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The impact of climate change will be felt more strongly in the future – and in Germany too. This is the conclusion reached in what is called the vulnerability analysis, a comprehensive study on Germany's vulnerability to climate change.